


Eyes Would See Her, Wouldn't They?

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:54:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2782208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missy thinks they should go to Gallifrey. The Doctor has his doubts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eyes Would See Her, Wouldn't They?

“Let’s go home.”

He looks at her over the top of his book, not bothering to put it down or raise his head. She’s stood in the external entranceway, doors flung open, arms braced either side of the frame, half-suspended over the stars. But she’s looking back at him rather than into space, and anyway, there’s nothing out there. He’s parked the TARDIS in the middle of nowhere, and he’s definitely not planning on going for a while. He wants to be alone.

There is a pause, and then he makes a decision.

“Can’t you see I’m reading?”

He licks a fingertip, turns the page, goes back to the book.

“Oh! You’re no fun!” she says, and jumps for it.

~

He’s writing on a data pad, making notes about the confiscated phone. Missy drapes herself over the arm of his chair, getting in the way.

“Come on, let’s go; I’m bored.”

He tries to concentrate, but she looks the unpowered device over and over, idly.

_What are you doing here?_

He gingerly removes Missy's weapon to a far shelf, and she arches her back and rests her chin on her hands and gazes up at him. With a huff of irritation, he gives up on the data pad, sets it on his lap.

“Go where?”

“Home!” as if it were the most obvious thing.

The Doctor wants to tuck the curl that’s fallen across her eyes back behind her ear so that he can see her face more clearly, but he resists.

“To Gallifrey?”

“No, to Raxacoricofallapatorius. Yes, Gallifrey. Take me to Gallifrey. Take me home. _I’ll taaake you home agaiiin, my Missy!_ ”

He frowns. “Can’t.”

“Won’t, you mean.” She pouts.

“Can’t or won’t, what difference does it make? We’ll not go to Gallifrey.”

“It makes a difference to me,” she says, and straightens, stalks off.

~

“Missy.”

She’s beside him in the moment between the synchronised beating of paired hearts, her skirt brushing his shoulder.

“If it’s just about going somewhere…” He talks at his work, repairing and reassembling a holo-projection node that’s gone on the fritz and left a delay in his desktop theme. “We could go somewhere else. We could go anywhere, see anything.”

Missy fidgets, runs her hand through the screws, before he fumbles for them to set them back into the projector’s housing.

“Not Earth.”

“No, not Earth. There’s more in the universe than Earth and Gallifrey.”

The case secure, the Doctor snaps the device into its housing on the wall. He looks up at Missy from his position on the floor.

“Are you sure about that, Doctor?” she asks. “You don’t always seem to be aware.”

“You’re one to talk.”

He gestures at her with the screwdriver, and she paces across the gap experimentally. The image behind her goes jagged but then settles into place. She blinks.

“I go where you go, my dear.”

Missy returns to his side and reaches down to him. He ignores her hand and gets to his feet, dusting off his knees.

He studies her. “Will you always?”

“It’s possible. Perhaps. I have insufficient data to make a meaningful prediction.”

“Insufficient data? After all this time?”

She looks down and away, demurring.

“I don’t always get to choose,” she says at last.

~

She’s peering over his shoulder at the chalk board, where he has been scribbling equations. He’s calculating those intangible analyses of the spirit, attempting to work out the continuous probability distributions of will and might have and is not. She’s purposely leaning into his back; if she wasn’t behind him, she wouldn’t have to stand on her tiptoes to see.

“The work is wrong. Your maths is atrocious!” She tuts. “Look at that, right there, right there glaring you in the face. It’s as plain as the nose…”

He scowls. “I don’t see it. This is all made up. You’re always trying to make me doubt myself.”

Missy stretches a hand towards the board, the scent of leather and powder ghosting from her arm. She touches the slate with a manicured nail. “ _There_. See, Doctor?”

He reads it over to himself, and the silence is an admission.

“How did I not see that before?” He picks up the eraser and rubs out everything after the error. He turns to her, tender, and the apology hangs between them, unspoken but heard by both.

“I was right. You need me.”

“Yes.”

~

Missy appears and rests her chin on his shoulder as he sits at the Wurlitzer. He keeps on moving over slow chord changes, contemplating a sequence, approximation in human scales (in human scale) of a progression from their childhood.

She reaches around him and floats her hands over his on the keyboard, palms just touching his knuckles, fingers brushing fingers, featherlight as though they’re barely there. She hums the old tune over his harmonies, staying with him until he finds a resolution.

“Don’t you want to see it?”

He’s silent, straining still to hear the faint sounds fade away.

“Don’t you want to see Gallifrey, again? No, don’t answer that. I know you do. So what’s the matter? What are you so afraid of?”

 _You_ , he thinks. _I’m afraid of you._

“I reckon you’ll have to face it eventually, and you might as well let me help you. You’re all alone.”

“I’ll be fine,” he says.

“You don’t sound fine.” She curls her fingers so they thread through his. His own spasm, splay, and then relax, bending into the touch. She presses close to murmur into his ear.

“You’re putting it off, trying to pretend it never happened, that I never gave you those coordinates; you’re trying to ignore it, just like you ignore your losses, just like you did for all that time after you brought Gallifrey back, trying not to look. Scared. Coward. ‘What will they say? What will they do? What will they make me do?' You want it so much, and yet you don’t want to face it. You don’t want to face the possibility you might not be wanted, or the possibility it might not be what you think, or even the possibility it might not be there at all.

“Look at me, Doctor!”

He turns his head to look up at her as she pulls away, and she smiles the satisfied smile of someone who likes to be obeyed.

“Come on,” she says, looking him in the eye. “Let’s face it together.”

~

“That wasn’t very you.”

It’s later, and they’re side by side in the console room, contemplating the familiar coordinates, the ones written into their memories before they could walk.

“You don’t think I want to do things with you, together?”

“I don’t think you want to help me. And I really didn’t think you wanted to go back to Gallifrey.”

Gallifrey that was in chaos. Gallifrey in thrall to a mad god. Gallifrey on which the Master had died (for the Doctor, the Master died for the Doctor).

She brings one hand out from behind her back, smoothes her palm over the metallic console edge, pauses where two panels meet, and rests it there. Taps her fingers in soundless succession.

“I just want what you want?” Even as she says it, Missy doesn’t seem convinced.

“ _Why?_ ”

She shrugs. “If I’m stuck here with you, I might as well.”

“Oh, so I’m just an entertainment to you, am I? Just a way to pass the time when you’ve nowhere else to go? You’re going to do what I want because it’s easier than the alternative? Thank you very much but no thank you, Miss Missy Mistress!”

They both know exactly how true _that_ is. Still, her mouth curves again, sardonic. The corners of her eyes crinkle.

“Are you sure it’s little old me you’re talking about? Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Look at yourself.”

The viewscreen flickers silver. Startled, he frowns into it, staring at his own reflection before toggling the zoom to look at hers beside him.

But by then she’s already gone.

~

He sends the TARDIS hurtling through space, no inputs except parameters for margins of avoidance, going nowhere, as they say, very fast. Just running. He needs the sensation of motion, of momentum, of time at his back and the stars in his hair.

“Seriously? Is that the kind of thing you’re usually thinking?”

“Get out of my head.” The words come out tight and tense, he thinks, with good reason.

Missy releases his wrist, but instead slips her arm into the crook of his elbow. He stiffens and straightens it, forcing her to let go.

She blows an annoyed but limp raspberry at him. “You’re not flying it right! You never were any good at piloting; we’ll not get anywhere like this. Come to think of it, you haven’t ever. Let me drive!”

She moves for the controls, but he grabs her arm, and when she tries with the other, he snatches that one as well, so that they’re locked in an impasse, his hands circled around her forearms. His TARDIS is linked first and foremost to his mind, of course, and he’s the only one here who can tell her what to do, but better safe than sorry.

Missy’s eyes flash, though, as she widens them, and the Doctor has just enough time to think about getting his leg out of the way before she kicks at his shin.

“Ow! You, you kicked me! How did you--”

“I’m flexible.” Missy is all too willing to demonstrate her flexibility, and he has to dance out of her way while still clutching her. For a moment, as they shift forwards and backwards across the deck, it’s as though they are actually dancing. Then she slithers one arm out of his grip and slams her palm on the brake.

The TARDIS grinds to a dead halt, terrifyingly sudden.

“Stop running,” Missy says. “Stop lying to yourself. Just stop.”

~

“ _Out!_ Out! Leave me _alone!_ ”

The Doctor doesn’t know if he’s demanding or begging.

“I _can’t!_ ”

He has his eyes closed, and she’s still there. He shuts his mind and he can still feel her, like a shadow made of hard light. A spectre.

“I don’t want you here! I don’t want to go to Gallifrey! I don’t _want to know_!”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about that!”

Missy gets right up close to him, crowding into his space, her forehead cold on his. He opens his eyes and hers are bright and wide, filling his vision. She lowers her voice but it’s no less intense, no less vibrating with anger and frustration and pent-up, helpless anxiety.

“If you won’t stop thinking about it, _I can’t stop talking to you about it_. If you really didn’t want to know, you would stop thinking about it and spinning in circles around the empty end of the local spiral and move on with getting somewhere else. If you don’t want me here, then, then--then...”

Maybe he’s crying, that’s a thing people do, isn’t it?

“Turn it off,” he says, ragged.

“Turn it off.”

His voice is hoarse.

The lights seem to dim for a moment before returning to normal again; the background hum seems to hesitate.

“Yes, I mean it. Deactivate.”

Missy recoils. Her posture is stiff, almost formal. Her expression is unreadable (except he can read it, except he knows, because he feels the same pain; because it is his pain).

He snarls. “ _Do as I say!_ ”

Then he is alone.

~

He enters the coordinates as though inputting an old phone number. He doesn’t require anyone to remind him of the sequence.

His TARDIS, faithful and patient and as ever ready to give him what he needs, wheezes out of one point in space and time and groans into another.

He flicks the viewscreen in quick succession, then steps away from the console. It’s very still as he makes his way to the external entrance, pulls back the wooden door.

Alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Promptfic combining two prompts:
> 
> "something they'd rather have forgotten" (anonymous) and  
> "discussing (or arguing about) what is the best planet they should go to" (sci-fi-fangirl).


End file.
